Monday, 20 February 2012

Designing Characters

These pages show my development of characters for a 2000ad sample script that you can find here. Reading those earlier entries, you'll see I had this plan of drawing a comic a month for a year. Well, this comic marks the premature end of that plan, as I started getting given scripts that would actually be read by people, so I slowed down a bit to make sure people saw my work at its best. I've had strips on the go ever since, so I must be doing something right!

So, continuing this month's theme of "Any Random Stuff That Doesn't Fit Elsewhere," let's see what was going on in my head at the time!

The script was very much about the melodramatic, over the top baddie, who decked pretty much everything in skulls. I decided to carry this through into just about everything else in his Evil Fleet Of Death. His cyborg body hopefully looks like a skeleton made of power armour. His Chief Hench-Thing hopefully looks like a robot monkey skeleton. In fact, I think I might have been going for some sort of ancestral ape feel.

These skull-and-weapon-laden-possibly-robots-possibly-people-in-armour show more than a little Warhammer 40K influence. Not to worry though, for the whole script was something of a homage to various storytelling tropes. In fact, writing this post has allowed me to rediscover a few cameos on the first page in among the fleet of ships and the inter-galactic UN.

This one is a little embarrassing. The script asked for a diplomat and robot based on an art deco style. I got this far through the design work before I realised my brain had suffered a funny turn and interpreted the word 'Deco' as 'Nouveau'. Never mind, I'm sure we'll see these two find a home somewhere.